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More educated women want to have children: Study

Submitted by Sophia Turner on Sat, 05/09/2015 - 21:26

The Pew Research Center has found that motherhood and postgraduate education have been clashing less among women, and that it has lead to a drop in highly educated women who remain childless in their mid-40s.

Presently, 22% of women between the ages of 40 and 44 don't have children, which is a fall as compared to the 30% recorded in 1994.

The decline has been most dramatically observed in women carrying with a Ph.D. or an M.D., a full 35% of which were childless back in 1994. That number has dropped to 20 percent now.

Besides from simply having children, highly educated women have also been seen as having bigger families in comparison to the past.

According to the study, 60% of women who had at least a master's degree were likely to have at least two children. In 1994, the figures were at 51%. Mainly, those with two children have shown a rise to four percentage points whereas those with three or more offspring have grown six percentage points.

As per the Pew Research the trend has likely being driven by the changes that have come in society and demographics. The changes lines up with the increase in the number of women achieving leadership and managerial positions.

The study has also suggested that more and more women have started taking on the challenge of striking balance between work and family.

In the last 10 years, this has led to the lowest level of childlessness in women aged 40 to 44 in the country.

Earlier, in 1994 there were 18% of women who reached the end of their childbearing years and had not had one child. In the mid-2000s, the number went up to 20% but again declined in 2014 to 15%.

Although, more and more educated women started embracing having bigger families, yet the general trend of leaning towards smaller families is still there. In 1976, an average woman in her early 40s would used to have already given birth to three children, but by 2014, most families were two children households.